Hollinger Corp. 
pH 8.5 



i^HAT THE WAR MEANS 
TO EDUCATION 



CONVOCATION ADDRESS 

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY 

FEBRUARY 22, I918 

BY 

James Phinney Munroe 



.,4Sr 











WASHINGTON, D. C. 

19 1 8 



By Traaaftur 

APR 12 1919 



DOUGLAS C. MCMURTRIE NE^ YORK 






Vi 



WHAT THE WAR MEANS 
TO EDUCATION 

During the first year of the Great War in Europe, 
Dr. Sadler, a chief authority on education, wrote me 
to the effect that, even then, the War had pushed 
forward education in England at least two generations. 
Parliament is still divided over the passage of the com- 
prehensive Education Bill in which that advance is 
to be recorded; but, whether crystallized into legisla- 
tion or not, the great change is there in Great Britain 
and will sooner or later make its way into fundamental 
law. 

Since England has much farther than this country 
to travel in the matter of education, it is impossible 
for us to accomplish any such forward strides as she. 
But even should this war end within the year — an 
event which unhappily seems most unlikely — it will 
have left an indelible impress upon American edu- 
cation. The changes in teaching aims and teaching 
methods within the next twenty-five years are to be, 
I believe, profound; and, while it cannot be said that 
those changes had their root in conflict, for they were 
impending before 19 14, it is the war which has 
brought them into public recognition, and it is the 
war which will so hasten their progress as, four years 
ago, would have seemed beyond belief. 

The old world passed out of existence in that 
tragic August of four years ago. The world in which 
you young men and women will play your part is 



4 WAR AND EDUCATION 

one as different from that into which I entered as 
mine differed from that of the eighteenth century. 
The last thirty-five years have seen changes in the 
scales of American social, business and intellectual 
life vast in their magnitude; and now, with the 
ending of this greatest of wars, there will be a new 
leap forward, not only on the side of industry and 
commerce, but still more in those things which affect 
the social, emotional and educational life of the people. 

Meanwhile we live in the midst of paradox. We 
are seeing, on the one hand, such national expenditure 
as, five years ago, was declared impossible. On the 
the other hand, we are experiencing an absorption 
in economies and a cheerfulness in deprivations of 
which we believed ourselves incapable. We are witnes- 
sing preparations for the taking of human life on a 
scale which it was asserted this people would never 
countenance or bring themselves to pay for. On 
the other hand, we are developing such an interest 
in the safeguarding of human life as seemed beyond 
the powers of this happy-go-lucky people. We are 
going through the greatest proportional depletion of 
our schools and colleges since the Civil War; yet 
never before has the public interest in and concern 
for education been so acute as now. 

These apparent paradoxes are, in fact, not such at 
all. They are merely the two sides of a single shield, 
and one is, in fact, the inevitable corollary of the 
other. In order for the good things involved in econ- 
omy of living, in care for human life and in sound 
education, to be understood and worked for, it 
seemingly was necessary for our nation to be brought 
face to face with the awful facts of reckless expendi- 



WAR AND EDUCATION 5 

ture, of waste of human life, of threatening disaster 
through ignorance or through lack of a due reserve 
of highly skilled and highly educated men. And 
the silver lining to this hideous cloud of devastating 
war is found in the fact that out of its dreadful 
sufferings ancj wastes and long-enduring evils will 
come, in time, a thrift, a regard for individual life 
and a confidence in the power of real education that 
will not only be new to this Country, but, in its 
effect upon coming generations, will be so beneficial 
as almost to offset the manifold evils of the War. 

The education of my boyhood time, owing to tradi- 
tion, inertia and a general ignorance as to what 
education means, was largely one of waste. We 
wasted well-intentioned effort upon perfectly fruit- 
less things. We wasted the time of child and youth 
upon work that meant as little to us as it did to them. 
We shrank from "wasting" money in experimentation, 
but delighted in spending ten times as much upon 
traditional teaching the very source of whose tradi- 
tion had for generations been forgotten. We wasted 
our natural resources and taught coming generations 
how to continue that waste in exaggerated forms. 
And, worst of all, we wasted that most precious of 
all national assets: human ability and human energy, 
with almost drunken prodigality. That we survived 
this national orgy, that we are today richer and 
more powerful than ever before, is testimony to the 
soundness not of our methods, but of our national 
birthright and of mother nature. 

To have gone on with this social and educational 
waste, howfever, for another generation or two would 
have brought us unfailingly to the brink of national 



6 WAR AND EDUCATION 

bankruptcy. Already we were getting alarmed about 
the shrinkage in our forests, our coal and our many 
other natural endowments. Already we were begin- 
ning to measure and weigh the oncoming generation 
and to find alarming portents in its diminishing 
vitality. Already we were asking ourselves why we 
should protect our vegetable, and not our human 
growths; why we should have elaborate laws for the 
preservation of hogs, and none for the preservation 
of boys and girls. And some of us were even daring 
to question the sacredness of our educational tradi- 
tions and to wonder if it wefe really ordained of 
Heaven that the child should be fitted to the edu- 
cational process rather than that the educational 
process should be fitted to the child. 

Upon this shadowland of questioning and doubt, 
burst the Great War; and, as is the habit of catas- 
trophes, brought us face to face with naked and appal- 
ling facts. That we found ourselves unprepared to 
deal with such an enemy as Germany, who has made 
war a supreme business for half a century, is perhaps 
to our credit; but it is greatly to our discredit that 
we could not rise quickly to a vast emergency, 
whatever might be its origin or character. We found 
ourselves to have become, through great riches and 
much absorption in them, slothful and self-indulgent. 
We found that our sons and daughters knew more 
about motor-cars than about creative work. We 
learned that our governmental machinery was rusty 
with age and circumlocution. We discovered that, 
far from having unlimited agricultural and mineral 
resources, a few months, or even a few weeks, might 
bring us to national starvation and death from cold. 



WAR AND EDUCATION 7 

And we found ourselves compelled to take exact 
stock of our human energy, to count it out, indi- 
vidual by individual, for service in battle, in the 
factory and on the farm, and, to our increasing 
alarm, we are discovering that those human resources 
have a very definite limitation both in numbers and 
in fitness for the tasks that they must do. So, practi- 
cally for the first time in our haphazard American 
life, we are facing the inexorable fact that we have 
been a nation wasteful beyond all others and that 
this waste must stop. And that stopping can come 
only through an education which is no longer waste- 
ful, and through a focusing of that education to a 
large degree upon the problems of preventing wastes. 

Education, after the great War, will no longer be, 
I believe, a spendthrift in itself and a praiser and 
promoter of extravagance. It will be, on the contrary, 
an education conserving the pupil's time, his indi- 
viduality and his special aptitudes and talents; it 
will be one that, directly and indirectly, will fix 
attention upon certain great fundamental wastes 
which must no longer be permitted, and the preven- 
tion of which is a thing worthy of the best efforts 
of mankind. 

The supreme acquisitive years are those between 
birth and majority, and in those years the physical 
and mental health, the character, the aims, and 
practically the life career of the individual are for 
all time determined. Yet a large proportion of those 
precious twenty-one years are now thrown away, 
because of the ignorance of parents as to what edu- 
cation means, because of the adherence of schools 
to traditions which have meant nothing since medieval 



8 WAR AND EDUCATION 

days; because of our fear of teaching immediately 
practical and useful things; because of our queer 
notions that work is a curse and that play has no 
training value; because we create vast educational 
plants and then use them to one-fifth of their capacity; 
because, in short, we do not take a human being 
seriously until he becomes a man, until the precious 
period in which he might have been made a real 
man and an effective citizen has irrevocably passed. 
The first lesson that education itself must learn is 
that it is a serious business: serious, because it deals 
with the prime asset of mankind ; a business because 
it has a certain definite task to do, and a limited 
time in which to do it, and should conserve every 
minute and every resource of that short training 
period. Most current education cannot presume to 
call itself, however, either serious or businesslike; 
for it leaves four-fifths of its task to be performed 
haphazard, on the streets and in by-ways; because 
it still regards the child as a mechanism to be fitted 
into its stereotyped machinery, not as a human intel- 
lect and soul to be individually developed; because 
it sublimely ignores all the experience and teaching 
of other businesses; because, while spending a great 
proportion of the national revenue, it feels no obli- 
gation to render any specific returns for those ex- 
penditures, and makes no study of the efficiency of 
the output of its vast and costly mechanism. 
/ The War will almost have been worth while If, 
through the lessons it will teach, our complex educa- 
tional systems come to realize that they must make 
themselves really efficient, by using their plants to 
capacity; by supervising the whole training of the 



WAR AND EDUCATION Q 

child, in school and out; by making use of the immense 
educative power both of real work and of real play; 
by teaching those who are to be the fathers and 
mothers of the future how to make homes and how 
to fulfil their obligations to society; by developing 
children into self-respecting citizens not only by 
training them for democratic citizenship, but by care- 
fully helping them to make for themselves a real 
place in the social and economic world. 

More than this, education in the United States 
after the War will utilize, I believe, to a degree far 
beyond present experience, numerous aids and forces 
outside the school. The home is much more interested 
in educating the child than is the school; yet at 
scarcely a single point do these chief elements in the 
upbringing of the boy and girl come into cooperation 
or even into contact. The community has everything 
at stake in this matter of education, for upon the 
quality of its citizenship its happiness and pros- 
perity depend; yet, except though a school board 
or an occasional interested citizen, the community 
is as remote from the inside of the schoolhouse as 
it is from the steppes of Turkestan. Industry must 
depend for its welfare wholly upon the kind of youth 
who come to it as workers; yet only in extremely 
rare instances do the school which is training the com- 
ing generation and the industries whose future lies 
in the hands of that new supply of workers, come 
together for the common end of making youth com- 
petent for this vast business of producing and distri- 
buting goods essential to human well-being. Outside 
every schoolroom and every college hall is a great 
field of nature, of agriculture, of manufacturing, of 



lO WAR AND EDUCATION 

political and social experience. Associated with all 
those human activities are thousands of men and 
women, not only competent, but eager to share effec- 
tively in the work of the schools. Yet they and the 
school and college faculties are as far apart as the 
antipodes. In every city, and especially in one like 
Washington, are huge collections, libraries and other 
fountains of knowledge which are being used only by 
a few institutions such as yours. Those citizens, 
those industries, those vast storehouses of knowledge 
should be made part and parcel of the educational 
system of the whole United States, and we should 
regard as clearly defrauded that child, who, as a 
part of his elementary education, that youth who, 
as a part of his secondary and college training, that 
student who, as a part of his professional prepara- 
tion, has not had every opportunity to get the use 
of some or all of these almost untouched sources 
of true learning. The term 'social education' is still 
a strange one to most of us; but in it lies the whole 
economic, intellectual and moral future of this 
Country. If the coming generation is to be educated 
to take its proper and effective place in the vast 
complex of modern society, it must have as its 
teachers, not merely some few men and women paid 
to hear lessons and to give formal lectures; it must 
have the teaching of all the varied forces of modern 
social and industrial life, it must be brought, as far 
as possible, into real contact with all the elements 
which are building, out of the resources of nature 
and of man, an ever more complicated, ever more 
efficient, and ever more spiritual world. 



WAR AND EDUCATION II 

By the catacylsm of this great War, the forces of 
industrial and social life, the intellectual activities, 
and, above all, the spiritual emotions, of human 
society have been, stirred to their uttermost limits. 
Before, we skated on the surfaces of things; now 
we are looking into their illimitable depths. Before, 
we regarded industry as a means for making money; 
now we perceive it to be one of the essential formatives 
of human society. Before, we looked upon human 
beings as automata, and their education as a sort of 
hocus-pocus with little relation to mental or spiritual 
life; now we know that every individual is precious 
and that his personality and its right development 
are essential elements in the Divine scheme. Out 
of this welter of battle and preparation for battle 
is to come to all the world, and especially to this 
new part of it, teeming with wealth of body and mind 
and soul, widespread self-searchings and profound 
self -revelations. From those will be born, in the 
proximate generations, such poets, such artists, such 
men of science, such philosophers, such great intel- 
lectual and moral leaders, as will make this materially 
great Country of ours enduringly great. For the 
vast stores of grains and minerals, the wealth of 
cities, the labor and the striving of mankind exist, 
not for the heaping up of gold and the creating of 
things and more things; they exist as the rich source 
and fruitful menstruum out of which, in each suc- 
ceeding generation, emerge a few master minds, a few 
discoverers, a few real poets, a few high spiritual leaders, 
who, by their work, their inspiration, and their compel- 
ling example, raise their generation one step higher in 
the great, continuous uplift of the world. And I 



12 WAR AND EDUCATION 

confidently believe that the time will come, after the 
hurts and sorrows of this great War have been in 
some measure healed, when we in the United States 
will, to use Lincoln's fine phrase, "solemnly rejoice" 
that by this cataclysm we were shaken to our very 
foundations and that out of those deep and catas- 
trophic national emotions were born the supreme 
men and women who, I am certain, will issue, directly 
or indirectly, from this world-wide conflict, and who 
will make this beloved nation of ours not only the 
leader, but also the great exemplar of mankind. 



LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 



I 



020 914 331 8 



HoUin 
pl 



L'SRARY OTCONGRESS 



020 914 331 8 



HoUinger Corp. 
r^H ft "^ 



